and gather it all in a bunch of heather
by Brightness Wordweaver
Summary: Sarah is trying to reunite with Jareth and has run out of options. Jareth wants to be found, but has no power to make it so. Scarborough Fair might be the only place they can come back together for good. Better break out the parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme...


**A/N:** I didn't intend to write any more Labyrinth fic after "Year's Worth of Dreams", but I should really know better by now than to try and predict what I'll write next.

Inspiration and the title come from Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair". See if you can spot cameos from X-Men: First Class, Doctor Who, and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I own none of the above, nor Labyrinth.

...

The Fair was not quite the strangest place Sarah had ever seen, but it came in a very close second.

The strangest place ever, for her, would always and forever be the Labyrinth; if you didn't have a fox riding a dog and a pit full of talking hands, you just couldn't compete. The Fair's strangeness, though, was on a whole other level. There was a kind of timelessness to it-maybe in how it couldn't make up its mind whether to be a 1950s county fair or a surprisingly accurate ren-faire, or in how the people milling about seemed to come from literally every time period imaginable.

To add to the not-quite-believability of it all, some of those people were quite definitely not human, and others were far from as normal as they seemed. Just as Sarah passed by the bowling booth, a dark-haired man in a wheelchair sent the ball rolling into the pins without appearing to touch it at all. Sarah was tempted to approach the man and ask how he did it, and if it was magic, but found herself preempted by a pretty brunette woman pushing her way through towards the booth, or the man, and the crowd swept her away.

Reunions. That was what the Fair was for, or so Hoggle had explained to her. Three hundred sixty-four days a year, it simply didn't exist, but for the one remaining day, you could get there, provided you knew how to ask. Sarah hadn't, but Hoggle did. He hadn't wanted to tell her; he'd let something slip after hearing the song and saying it was all mistaken, and she'd dragged the rest out of him.

Scarborough Fair was where you went to reunite with the love of your life, when all else had failed and no other solution was possible. Sometimes you had to try multiple times, but eventually all the desperate lovers ended up finding each other again here.

Sarah scanned the crowd. She would never have thought _he_ would be difficult to spot, but she hadn't counted on the sheer variety of people. She thought back to the last time she'd been hunting for him in the middle of a crowd, and gave a wry little smile.

...

Jareth, King of the Goblins, knew better than to get his hopes up. He'd been doing this for seven years now, and his wretched, beautiful girl was never there.

The first few years, he'd hunted methodically through the other Fair attendees, trying to look into each face, anticipating their reunion in every fiber of his being. Eventually, he'd taken to simply showing up and spending his time scanning the Fair through his crystals-something which had to be done while you were actually there, he'd discovered; magic only worked if you brought it in with you. Those years hadn't brought Sarah back to him either, and now he simply arrived, found a quiet corner away from all the happy couples, and periodically looked through his crystals to see if she'd arrived. She never did.

His usual spot, between the Ferris wheel and the stone-lifting booth, was already occupied by a silver-haired man in a dark suit and a much younger bottle-blonde woman, snogging exuberantly. Jareth contained his distaste-glass houses and stones, after all-and settled for leaning against the wooden frame of the food pavilion in the shadows cast by the sideshow tent. What good was being the Goblin King if you didn't lurk every now and then?

This would be the last year, he reflected, watching the people pass. He barely believed enough to be let in, anymore, and there was no point in re-fracturing his heart year after year for a girl who had likely long since forgotten him. He did look in on her periodically, once after every Fair, and she never seemed anything but happy and content with her life. She would marry and carry on her mortal life, and never even think of coming back to him.

Certainly she would never be desperate enough for him to be admitted to Scarborough Fair.

...

When Hoggle first told her about the Fair, Sarah had thought maybe you had to do a series of tests to be let in. "You don't have to make a seamless cambric shirt? Or buy beachfront property, or anything?" she'd said suspiciously.

Hoggle had laughed his barking laugh. "Nah, nah, I told you that silly song's got it all wrong. The whole point of the Fair is to _help_ people find each other when it's impossible otherwise. Why would they make it even harder?"

But Sarah was starting to wonder if there wasn't a trick to it after all. How were you supposed to find anybody in this circus? Especially when people kept on breaking your concentration with their own excited reunions.

She stepped into a patch of shade to catch her breath, and nearly knocked over a tall man in rumpled Regency dress who looked about to perform either a complicated chemical reaction or a one-man seance.

"Don't spill the water!" he cried out, lunging to protect his equipment. Sarah moved away hastily, and the man looked rather sheepish.

"It's all right, really, it's just there are hardly any good places to set up a scrying spell here. I've simply got to get this done right the first time; it's bad enough owing Norrell a favor for one trip here-"

Sarah interrupted him. "You can do magic? To find people? And to think I've been fighting my way through that mess out there."

The man looked slightly alarmed. "Don't tell anyone, will you? If everyone knew I could do this, I wouldn't get a moment's peace. Tell you what, I'll find who you're looking for, as a favor, if you keep mum about me doing it."

"I wouldn't have told anyone anyway. But thanks awfully," Sarah said, releasing a sigh of relief. "Go ahead and do yours first and don't mind me; I need to catch my breath."

Her new acquaintance nodded and busied himself over the silver bowl that seemed to be the centerpiece of the whole arrangement, finally peering into the water intensely. Evidently, whatever he saw was good, because he gave a yell of delight-and then a gasp of horror. "No, no, no no no, he can't be here. He shouldn't be anywhere." The man sprinted out into the light, shoving his way past people with hasty apologies or none at all. Sarah hesitated for the barest second, then followed hot on his heels.

...

The dark-haired woman who had invaded his corner was not Sarah. She was dressed brightly, in clothes likely belonging to the early nineteenth Aboveground century, and had her hair done up in little ringlets.

"Do you mind if I rest here a moment?" she asked, fanning herself. "I'm looking for my husband, but I don't know that I can go on without getting out of the sun for a little."

Jareth gestured briefly in assent, but made no other attempt at communication. The woman seemed to realize that he was in no mood for conversation, and kept silent as well. For a while.

"You know," she said at last, "it's the strangest thing, but you remind me of someone I once knew-a fairy-king..."

"Arabella!" A man's voice, deep and out of breath, sounded over the noise of the milling people in the main way, and the woman's head jerked around as if on a string. Jareth would have been glad that his unwanted interlocutor seemed likely to leave, but the man's next words were. "Get away from him! What are you doing with my wife, you wretch? Don't you fairy-folk ever die?"

Jareth would have retorted that he'd never seen either half of the couple in his life, and never intended to again, but at that moment was distracted by something else-a woman in white, dark brown hair whipping and green eyes flashing as she covered the distance between them.

On some dreamlike instinct, Jareth caught her in his arms and swung her around, laughing and unable to take his eyes off of her. The crystal-visions had been woefully inadequate. She was _stunning_.

Somewhere, what seemed like a very long ways off, the Arabella-woman was explaining to her husband that Jareth was not any long-lost enemy of theirs, but he didn't have time for that, focusing on the much more important task of setting Sarah down while keeping her as close as possible. "I can't believe I found you on my first try," she was saying. "Hoggle said some people come years and years in a row and never find who they're looking for."

Jareth chuckled. So the dwarf had told Sarah how to get here. He might have to make Hoggle a prince after all. "He would know," he said softly. Sarah still heard him.

"How long have you been coming here?" she demanded fiercely, holding tight to him.

"This is the seventh time," Jareth admitted. "I had no power over you, and even your own wish could not change that. This was the only place we could come back to each other."

"I wish I'd known. But it doesn't matter now-are we going to end up in the Underground, or in my room when the Fair is over?"

"You...would want to come back with me to the Underground?" Jareth had been sure that it would take months, even years of persuasion to get Sarah to leave her life Aboveground, even with the magic of the Fair helping them out. "For good?"

"Well, yes, if we'll be split up otherwise. I don't know if the no-power-over-me would keep you out of my world still. And I've waited this long, I'm not going to get separated from you again. Closure with my family and my job would be nice, but it's not a deal-breaker."

There just weren't enough words in human language to describe Sarah Williams, Jareth concluded, registering a welling, bubbling sensation of sheer joy behind his ribs. "Precious thing, I think the Fair can arrange for us to both come back to wherever you are, if only to collect some of your personal effects. I fully intend to whisk you away to the Underground as soon as you say the word, but it might be better if we didn't cause your parents to spend their life savings on a fruitless detective search."

"My place it is, then," Sarah said, beaming. "I've gotta warn you, it's kind of a mess. Do Goblin Kings have to strew kitchen herbs everywhere as part of getting here, or just us mere mortals?"

"Everyone has to obey the rules of the Fair, Sarah-love," Jareth said. "Even Goblin Kings."

And, so conversing, they walked out into the light to enjoy the remainder of Scarborough Fair.


End file.
